Straub-Huillet Retrospective

"If we hadn't learnt how to make films, I would have planted bombs"

- J.-M. Straub

This retrospective of the oeuvre of French filmmaking duo, Jean-Marie Straub (1933-2022) and Danièle Huillet (1936-2006), is the first full retrospective since their death. It is an opportunity to revisit, or discover, a body of films, screened in chronological order, that, although of bicephalous origin, represents one of the most unique authorial universes in the history of cinema and a masterpiece of modern cinema. Each screening will be presented by a different guest who, from their own perspective and disciplinary framework, will offer new ways of reading their oeuvre. The programme is complemented by a selection of films which, through the directors’ own voices, give us an intimate glimpse of their working processes.  

Straub-Huillet's career began in the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1960s, from where they moved to Italy and France. The work they created is intensely focused on the cultural, historical and geographical contexts in which they filmed, reflecting a great interest in the word and the different languages that they worked with (German, French, Italian, English). It is also fuelled by appropriation of other works (literary, musical, pictorial) produced by an extremely heterogeneous group of auteurs that they repeatedly returned to.

Straub and Huillet are therefore the authors of a truly pan-European cinema, in which an interest in classical antiquity coexists with a critical revision of Marxist ideals, revival of forgotten texts, obsessive attention to variations of light on the landscape, intonation of words by actors, gestures and ambient sounds. It is also a cinema that, in opposition to anthropocentric reason and the imperatives of progress, formalises a "communist utopia", which can only be understood within the framework of a proposal for communion with the world, as a parity of all things, as a synthesis between Marxism and ecology, at a time when environmental movements were still in their infancy. A cinema that, with the same degree of attention and reverence, takes equal care in filming a mountain, a stone, an actor, a tree, the earth, a valley, a clearing, a text, a piece of music, an insect, or anything else positioned in front of the camera. A cinema that avoids inflating images, and looks carefully at each and every object, trying to ascertain what is unique in it and what all objects share, here and now, corresponding to what they have in common (this is the dimension of revolutionary communism): the whole is not the sum of the parts, it is the equal participation of all elements in that irreducible unity that we call the world.